Chapter Text
Laura was used to a lot. To howl of wind and rise of waves; to the smell of Pennsylvania steam coal and North Atlantic sea-spray; to the hammer of triple-expansion screws and the bark of five-inch guns firing as they bore. And to almost any trial and tribulation that might strike when cramming a hundred souls into thrice as many feet of Navy steel.
If you asked her, those were the finest souls in the Coalition; nominally, hers was a Commonwealth ship, the blue banner out behind with maple and galley-crest upon it, but in-practice most came from Maine, rather than the Maritimes, and plenty from further afield. Her engineer was a Newfie, grown-up inland in the Dominion at Gander; her medical officer had spent her entire life in Toronto, born in Spadina and raised under the Republic; and the navigator was one of at least a dozen from the Haudenosaunee, come up from old Vermont or Hampshire to join the fight.
For her own part, Laura had spent her youth on the shores of Boston harbour, in what was now the East Kingdom’s heartland. But it hadn’t been, then, in the bitter years before the Coalition’s liberation; it had been a bloody fight to free the city, and one she’d taken pride of part in. The Kingdom had had no need of new captains, then, but the Commonwealth had taken her on. And though they’d sent her to hold picket, to let the Royal Navy brawl the despots’ fleet, it was her torpedo cut the Massachusetts in twain off Cape Cod.
Better part of a decade on, it was still the Bar Harbour’s proudest battle-star.
That day was nothing so prestigious; a routine reassignment, out from Long Island Sound and up to Halifax for refit. The Harbour was in travel trim, making twenty knots to a headwind from the northeast, and so she’d finished her watch and headed below, knowing full-well she could trust the crew in her stead. And yet, not twenty minutes later, they’d come down after to find her.
“Captain Howard, ma’am? You’re needed up top.”
“Talk to me,” she ordered as she arrived, scanning the half-dozen bridge crew at once. It was Petty Officer Ebbott who answered, their eyes straying to the windows.
“We’ve picked up a mayday,” they explained.
“And we aren’t already heading towards it?” she cut in; she could feel the engine-churn beneath her, and even without glancing at the instruments knew they weren’t above two-thirds. “Do we know where it is?”
That got her a wince. “Fourteen miles east, ma’am.” That was the vicinity of Sable Island, she knew, and while any fishers should have known just as well, in practice there were plenty of fools with a watch certificate. “Only thing is, it’s an automated beacon, or at least it sounds like one.”
“What’s the frequency?”
“406, ma’am.”
That gave her pause. In an ideal world, every ship on the sea would have had an automated beacon. But the world which Laura lived in, the scarred aftermath of a previous age, had no such luxuries; even the navy couldn’t afford to be throwing around microelectronics like that, and there were no satellites left to hear even if they could. None that could tell anyone about it, anyway.
Still, some wealthy captains did carry them. But the emergency frequency in the north, universally, was 640; 406 she’d only ever seen stencilled on sun-bleached plastic casings, ready to be cracked for enough copper to feed a fifteen-year-old girl for a week. By now, no doubt, the Kingdom had gathered up any she’d missed, the same way they found safe homes for all such wayward teens now.
“That’s pre-Burnout,” she confirmed, looking around at each face in-turn. Surely they’d all heard the stories; tales of tankers abandoned when the world-that-was came down, left adrift with holds full of things that didn’t exist anymore. Somewhere, they insisted, there was still the black ichor, deep in some hull left drifting on the tide.
In practice, Laura knew, nothing stayed afloat for sixty years unmaintained. If it really was old-world, then surely it was just one of those abandoned yachts, like the ones she’d grown up breaking down, rolled into the surf on a whim? More likely, though, she decided, some idiot had bought or bodged one back together, and not bothered to clear compatibility with the actual systems in place.
“Call it in to Halifax,” she ordered. Immediately, people started moving. “Miss Shenandoah, lay a course for the source of that signal.”
“Aye ma’am,” the girl whirled to the helm; sharp, she was, and quick to the wheel. “Steer for 098; all ahead flank.”
“Zero-nine-eight, all ahead flank!”